Witches' Cases Stir Up Double, Double Toil And Trouble

Now it's witches. Yes, I said witches. You got a problem with that? Not me, no sirree. And let me just say for the record that I am totally against burning witches. Or anyone, for that matter.

Just wanted to get that straight right away. I do believe in witches, I do believe in witches, I do, I do, I do believe in witches.

Blame it on Ken Starr, but the weird just got weirder.

In Maryland, a 15-year-old high-school girl recently was suspended on suspicion of casting a spell on a fellow student. And in Missouri, a witch is suing her town of 6,000 for refusing to remove the Christian fish symbol from the town seal.

See how simple your life really is?

Sometimes the news is too strange to be true. Yet even stranger is how we respond to it. Watch as we figure out ways to protect the free-speech rights of a teenage witch and seek to separate church and state for the sake of a cauldron keeper.

Such are the pressing concerns of a well-fed nation.

The student in question, Jamie Schoonover, is just a regular kid, except for the fact that she admits to practicing witchcraft as taught by her mother, who actually used to be her father before his/her transsexual surgery. Ho-hum, just another day in middle America.

Her ``mother,'' Colleen Harper, is miffed, saying her daughter is a victim (naturally) of religious discrimination. Her daughter would never put a hex on another student, because, silly, that would be counterintuitive under Wicca's principles. Wicca, for you monotheists out there, is the practice of a form of neo- paganism.

Basically, Wicca practitioners revere a mother Goddess and a father God, believe in reincarnation, practice magic and harm none. No ritual sacrifices, alas. Wiccans also believe, according to Harper, that anything a witch does, for good or bad, comes back to the doer threefold. Ergo, her daughter wouldn't hex another lest she be thrice hexed herself.

``I'm highly upset because this is a faith we practice as devoutly as a Christian would practice Christianity,'' said Harper.

School officials, thankfully, are out of their league. Guns and drugs, they know. Witchcraft and hexes? Do we have to go there?

A school spokesperson said that Schoonover was briefly suspended for threatening another student, thus violating the discipline code, not for how she threatened her. The child who allegedly was threatened, incidentally, was so hysterical that she couldn't speak.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, Jean Webb is fighting her own battle for tolerance and understanding. A former Baptist and the mother of two teenagers, Webb wants Republic town officials to remove the Christian fish symbol from the city seal. Her fellow townspeople aren't taking kindly to the idea that a witch, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, is suing them.

One neighbor has shouted that Webb will go to hell; a grocery-store clerk closed her register when Webb approached her checkout counter; anonymous phone callers have unleashed obscenities.

Webb, undaunted, proclaims herself a woman of principle. Were she to give up, she said, she would be sending a message that ``if there was any other minority they dislike, all they would have to do is be nasty to them and they would run.''

I don't know if I'm willing to grant high-principle standing to people who glorify the Dark Ages. If you want to be a witch, let's face it, you're going to have to take some flak. If I showed up at work declaring myself to be, say, a demon, I would have to figure some people wouldn't invite me to lunch.

On the other hand, the witches are probably right. We protect free speech in this country, unless, of course, the thing said offends a ``minority'' (i.e. someone other than a white male). And we don't mix church and state, even if only one person objects. One nation under God, meanwhile, has become a footnote to sentimentality.

Today we're a bat's brew of idiot interests and egomaniacs. Any nut with a computer can have a soapbox; any felon with a law dictionary can sue the state; any witch with a vocabulary can argue her right to be bizarre, even if its means that your kid has nightmares and wakes up with a mysterious rash.